With their 1999 record The Man Who, Travis became one of the UK’s biggest bands. Much of that was down to their indelible singalong Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, which became one of those songs that was popping up everywhere at the height of its popularity. It was on the radio, in pubs, playing on the jukebox in the Rovers Return, in your uncle’s car - wherever you were, you bumped into Why Does It Always Rain On Me?. And yet, in a recent interview with this writer for The New Cue, Travis frontman Fran Healy said the song’s success was far from assured. At the time of recording it, the Scottish quartet weren’t even sure if it would be a single. Healy went into the details about the creation of their monster hit.
“It was never really going to be a single,” he began, explaining that the majority of the group’s hopes were pinned on previous two singles Writing To Reach You and Driftwood. “I had to have this discussion with Andy MacDonald [Travis’ label boss] because it just wasn’t the obvious single at the time. Everyone was thinking Writing To Reach You and Driftwood, ‘these are big songs!’, so we put Writing To Reach You out first and it did OK, then Driftwood came out and did a bit better and then it was the matter of the third single. I remember sitting in Andy’s office and my argument was, ‘It’s summer, it’s Britain, it’s gonna rain, Wimbledon is gonna be on, let’s pitch it to Wimbledon’. We were desperate! Eventually, Andy was like, ‘Great, we’ll do it’ and we had to do an edit because it’s quite a long song on the album so we shortened it. We sent Dylan, our plugger, off to all the radio stations with it and then Wimbledon came and it didn’t rain, we were like, ‘We’re fucked!’.”
